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Review: Quebecois remix of Antigone gives ancient story an aggressively modern facelift

Author of the article:

National Post

Publishing date:

December 5, 2019 • 3 minute read

Nahéma Ricci in a scene from Sophie Deraspe's film Antigone.Photo by Ixion

By Angelo Muredda

Sophocles’s tragedy about civic versus familial duty gets an aggressively modern facelift in Sophie Deraspe’s Antigone, a Quebecois remixing of the play that will be Canada’s first entrant into the sweepstakes for the new Best International Film Oscar. Newcomer Nahéma Ricci gives a steely, star-making performance as the eponymous heroine, who defies the state in defence of her family.

Though theatre scholars and amateur library card holders alike will recognize the classical beats of the story, Deraspe’s version bends Sophocles’s vision to encompass police brutality and the refugee experience in contemporary Montreal. It sometimes strains for relevance in its grasp at youth culture in the age of smartphones and memes, but Antigone mostly impresses with its gumption.

Whereas Sophocles’s heroine insisted upon the just burial of her soldier brother Polynices, against the laws and authority of Creon, the film’s Antigone has an even more tangled path to civil disobedience. A strong student with a bright future in Canada, Antigone’s life and sense of obligation are thrown into disarray when her beloved brother Polynices (Rawad El-Zein), a popular student, is charged with resisting arrest during a drug bust where police fatally shoot their older brother Étéocle (Hakim Brahimi). Protesting the government’s plans to deport her surviving brother, Antigone cuts her hair and smuggles herself into his cell to take his place. Before long, she becomes a folk hero, her image circulated in posters and memes — some racist, some romanticizing her as a fresh-faced political rebel a la Greta Thunberg — and her every court appearance becomes an opportunity to politically motivate the tech-savvy Generation Y-ers in her class.

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Rather than simply transplanting her to another sociopolitical context, Deraspe refashions Antigone as a Joan of Arc figure following her gender-swapping prison stunt. It helps that Ricci bears a passing resemblance, in soulful, doe-eyed, tearful close-ups, to the great Maria Falconetti from Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. It’s a convincing analogy, given Antigone’s saintlike resolve, and her commitment to a form of justice that’s seemingly more enlightened than the state’s arbitrary shakedown of her siblings and grandmother, and countless other racialized immigrant families like them. Deraspe is also wise to stay attuned to recent youth-driven protest movements, recalling the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, and prefiguring the climate strike, by emphasizing the visual contrast between Antigone’s austerity of spirit and colourful red sweaters and tracksuits.

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These contemporary resonances largely keep the dust off a historically distanced text, animating it as political theatre rather than rendering it the stuff of Sparknotes and Wikipedia explainers. Yet there are moments when Deraspe’s reach exceeds her grasp. Although there is a certain structural chutzpah and audiovisual variety afforded by ceding so much of the screen time to montages of Antigone’s family entering the meme-sphere, there is a professional polish to those sequences that runs counter to the anarchic and organic spirit of the youth culture being portrayed.

That one of those montages, where Étéocle’s friends mourn him through tributes on unnamed social media platforms, is set to a song about police violence against Black men by Black Montreal hip-hop artist Nate Husser exacerbates Deraspe’s tendency to collapse differences in order to speak in a universal register. The film is also curiously mum on the ins and outs of this specific family’s refugee experience in Canada, using Antigone’s family drama as a universal signpost for the immigrant experience. It avoids any potential questions that might arise about the family’s model minority status, given their academic achievements, light skin and movie star good looks.

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Nahéma Ricci in Antigone.Ixion

The jump from the early depiction of the family’s arrival to the siblings’ relatively well-adjusted teen years risks obscuring what the film has to say about growing up with precarious citizenship in Canada. The film also flirts with stereotypes about racialized young men being exploited by gangs, and doesn’t do much to counter them besides offering Antigone up as a bridge across various Canadian social strata.

The mixed result of Deraspe’s bold stylistic approach to this topical subject matter is that Antigone sometimes feels stiff and unpersuasive, as though it is reaching too far to say something familiar. For all the film’s panache, and its efforts to transcend its well-realized realist aesthetic, it conveys that message most forcefully in the quiet and unassuming moments when Ricci is allowed to channel her character’s raw power in close-ups, to be a teen prematurely aged into adulthood, graduated straight from high school into the uncanny role of her family’s sole protector and advocate against an unmoved state.